Spanish is a Romance language and belongs to the Ibero-Romance group of languages. Considering first and second language speakers all over the world, Spanish has more than 400 mio speakers and is one of the six official languages of the United Nations. This number comes as no surprise, when you think about the many South American countries, in which Spanish is an official language (such as Mexico, Argentina, Columbia). As a matter of fact, the largest population of people who speak Spanish as a first language is located in Mexico. Due to this fact, there are, of course, many native speakers of Spanish located in the United States.

Besides these countries, Spanish also is an important language in other continents. When the Spanish empire expanded to Africa and America, and Asia Pacific it had an impact on the spreading of the language we can witness until now. Besides the linguistic influence, the Spanish Empire also influenced the countries it conquered culturally.

“Spanish” as term is very versatile as it describes and differentiates between the official language Castellano and the regional counterparts of it, like Aranese, Basque, Galician, and Catalonian.

Spanish also is part of the Indo-European language family. Because it is a descendant of Latin, there are many words you run into that are of Latin origin. When Spain was conquered in the 5th Century, the language was also heavily influenced by the Germanic. Some Arabic loanwords were adopted during the Moorish occupation in the 8th Century. The grammatical structures, however, go back to the Latin roots of Spanish. Especially when looking at the system of conjugations, this is quite striking.

There are 26 letters in the Spanish alphabet. Letters like k and w exist, but do only appear in proper names and words from other languages. What is more, there are some diacritics é, á, í, ó, and the special character ñ.

With the help of Lingi, you can translate any word from English to Spanish or vice versa. You can use it for free and it's easy as abc.